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A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

president.mit.edu

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Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#81

Post by j_maffe »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #49
mrhottakes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sow, then you reap. That's how it goes.

History is filled with episodes where collapsing empires took their knowledge centers with them, where for centuries thereafter the work was in recovering that lost knowledge versus advancing the frontier. It may seem self serving coming from an American. But I wouldn’t cheer on the collapse of an academic institution anywhere.

I wouldn't either. But the world is a better place with I would cheer the of an academic institution to lose its lead when it has deep ties with a military that terrorizes the world.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#82

Post by postalrat »

xnx wrote: post #65

> MIT: 20% drop in incoming graduate students This is kind of MIT's choice, right? They could change tuition or admission and have 20% more incoming graduate students.

Yes of course they could admit any person who didn't finish high school.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#83

Post by fastaguy88 »

jvanderbot wrote: post #31

What a Rorschach blot. Comments range from AI to immigration to doomsday results for USA. The admins statement in TFA speaks more to financial policy and grant declines. Unfunded students are much less likely to accept an admission. That's just a fact of life.

There are no un-funded graduate (PhD) students in the sciences and engineering at MIT (or any other top-ranked graduate program). The number of graduate student admissions is directly tied to the amount of external funding. If the faculty do not have the grants, their departments cannot admit students.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#84

Post by madars »

mrhottakes wrote: post #30
epistasis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, everyone is worse off. There is nothing good that comes from this.

If you live outside the US, there is.

Speaking as a European who did his PhD at MIT: that's destructive zero-sum thinking and "outsiders benefit" is backwards.

Knowledge spillover benefits everyone - would there be ASML (Dutch) without DARPA's monumental fundamental research investment in EUV? BioNTech (German) without NIH-funded mRNA research? Without American investment this research likely wouldn't have happened or would have come a decade later.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#85

Post by xp84 »

hgoel wrote: post #24
neksn wrote: post #7

And this is only the beginning. I wonder what a good white-collar career path will be post-AI? What is your opinion on this?

This isn't about AI, it's about research funding and what the guys in charge think about science and education.

How big is MIT’s endowment? They really still need to be at the taxpayer trough?

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#86

Post by JumpCrisscross »

fearmerchant wrote: post #72
shimman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talent wasted in the US maybe, but plenty of professors across the world are doing equivalent work. To think only the US is capable of doing ground breaking research is extremely foolish and an insult to humanity.

Elite human capital isn't normally distributed.

And neither is the capital equipment of research. The same mind will be far more effective with more resources than without, and when surrounded with similarly-enabled colleagues. (To explain it any other way requires some pretty racist reasoning around why scientific progress was dominated by a small group of countries over the last century or so.)

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#88

Post by j_maffe »

idontwantthis wrote: post #77
mrhottakes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live outside the US, there is.

If everyone loses but you lose less than the people you don’t like, does that make you a winner?

When an aggressor loses their weapons, everyone else is a winner, yes.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#89

Post by nyeah »

xnx wrote: post #65

> MIT: 20% drop in incoming graduate students This is kind of MIT's choice, right? They could change tuition or admission and have 20% more incoming graduate students.

The article mentions that a major factor in technical grad school is research funding. Most grad students in engineering, for example, don't pay tuition themselves. They work for a pittance and receive tuition as a benefit.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#90

Post by epolanski »

dangus wrote: post #47

We have never seen a presidential administration misunderstand soft power so badly. US universities were an incredible blessing to the “brand” of the USA. Foreign students come to the US, pay an inflated full sticker price, subsidizing US students, and learn from top educators who generally have a lens of Western values. Many of these students pursue permanent citizenship and bring with them new ideas, businesses, an…

Jm2c, but I really don't believe the "top educators" argument.

People keep mixing correlation with causation.

The reason why ivy league universities have generally stronger students is related to input: acceptance rates are lower and the weaker candidates are pre filtered.

Public universities around the world, obviously get a much wider variance in the student pool.

But that's about it.

There is strong evidence that ivy league students tend to be better on average.

There is _no_ evidence that this is related to the quality of education.

Hell, this is 2026 and that was true already decades ago.

You're not learning calculus or chemistry better at MIT than in an unknown university in Greece or Italy. You simply don't.

The overwhelming differentiator is the student, not the teacher. There's endless quality content and lectures online for the most diverse topics you can think of.

And, again, students in ivy league colleges are pre filtered for the most competitive ones.

And there's also another important factor: good scientists do not make necessarily good teachers. The two skills are unrelated.

And the better the scientist, the more their job is running the lab (fundraising) while delegating teaching to graduates and post docs.

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